Party and Constituency in the U.S. Senate, 1933–2004

Aldrich, John H.; Brady, Michael; Marchi, Scott de; McDonald, Ian R.; Nyhan, Brendan; Rohde, David W.; Tofias, Michael

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226534947.003.0003

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…We collect the result of each roll call vote for the twenty-year period in each chamber of the Congress, and record the individual votes for every Congressman voting on the bill (or abstaining). We choose to start with the raw bill data, rather than use alternate, publicly available versions of the Congressional roll call data (see, for example, the Voteview website, as well as McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 1997;McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006;Poole and Rosenthal 1985, 1997, 2007; among many others), or the Political Institutions and Public Choice (PIPC) House Roll Call Database (Aldrich et al 2008), because we exploit the text of each piece of legislation as described below.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Friends in High Places

Cohen¹,

Malloy

2014

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

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We demonstrate that personal connections amongst US politicians have a significant impact on Senate voting behavior. Networks based on alumni connections between politicians are consistent predictors of voting behavior. We estimate sharp measures that control for common characteristics of the network, as well as heterogeneous impacts of a common network characteristic across votes. We find that the effect of alumni networks is close to 60 percent as large as the effect of state-level considerations. We show that politicians use school ties as a mechanism to engage in vote trading ("logrolling"), and that alumni networks help facilitate the procurement of discretionary earmarks. (JEL D72, D85, Z13) T he passage or failure of any piece of legislation in the US Senate depends ultimately on the individual votes of the legislators. While many influences determine whether a given legislator votes for or against a bill, subtle influences can in some instances be powerful determinants of voting behavior, and thus final vote outcomes. In this paper, we explore one particular channel of influence: that of personal social networks. We show that our identified social networks can have large impacts on voting behavior, beyond those currently explored by the literature. In addition, our empirical strategy to isolate the impact of social networks exploits rich data comprising firms (and employment) in a senator's home constituency, which allows us to incorporate market information into measures of a bill's importance.

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Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Friends in High Places

Cohen¹,

Malloy

2014

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

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“…However, evidence that roll-call voting records (and other legislative behavior) are affected by the religious composition of a legislator’s constituency is mixed at best (Guth 2014; McTague and Pearson-Merkowitz 2013; Oldmixon 2005; Rosensone, Oldmixon, and Wald 2009; Wald 1987). The same might be said, however, for attempts at correlating other state or district-level demographic attributes with legislators’ roll-call voting records more generally (Aldrich et al 2009). Nevertheless, a handful of studies have found that the denominational character of members’ districts correlates with representatives’ voting behavior (Green and Guth 1991; Guth and Kellstedt 2005; Oldmixon and Calfano 2007; Smith, Olson, and Fine 2010; see also Martin 2009), committee assignments (Lewis 2014), and the issues that they address in floor speeches (Blackstone and Oldmixon 2015).…”

Section: Religion District Diversity and Voting In The Senatementioning

confidence: 99%

“… 4. Although we explored the use of second dimension DW-NOMINATE (DW-N) scores (see Aldrich et al 2009), our predictions were poor, and no clear story emerged from that particular piece of analysis. For the sake of parsimony, we omitted these results from the discussion of our main findings. …”

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confidence: 99%

Censor Morum?The 17th Amendment, Religious Diversity, and Ideological Extremism in the Senate

Neiheisel

Djupe

2016

Political Research Quarterly

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The Madisonian formulation suggests that (religious) pluralism is linked to moderate representation when filtered through republican selection. We leverage the quasi-experiment afforded by the ratification of the 17th Amendment to explore whether religious diversity shapes how senators vote. The shift from indirect to direct elections, coupled with roll-call and religious Census data, allows us to test hypotheses derived from differing conceptions of pluralism and the literature on constituency effects in Congress. We find that religious diversity is linked to ideological moderation, but that link weakens considerably in the immediate aftermath of the amendment’s passage.

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“…We collect the result of each roll call vote for the 20-year period in each chamber of the Congress, and we record the individual votes for every member voting on the bill (or abstaining). We choose to start with the raw bill data, instead of using alternate, publicly available versions of the congressional roll call data (see, for example, the Voteview.com, as well as McCarty, Rosenthal, 1997, 2006;Poole and Rosenthal, 1985, 1997, 2007, among many others), or the Political Institutions and Public Choice (PIPC) House Roll Call Database (Aldrich, Brady, de Marchi, McDonald, Nyhan, Rohde, and Tofias, 2009), which classifies bills by issue type (but is harder to map to specific firms or industries), because our approach exploits the specific text of each piece of legislation and allows us to map bills to affected industries.…”

Section: Data and Summary Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legislating stock prices

Cohen¹,

Diether

Malloy³

2013

Journal of Financial Economics

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In this paper we demonstrate that legislation has a simple, yet previously undetected impact on firm stock prices. While it is understood that the government and firms have an important relationship, it remains difficult to determine which firms any given piece of legislation will affect, and how it will affect them. By observing the actions of legislators whose constituents are the affected firms, we can gather insights into the likely impact of government legislation on firms.Specifically, focusing attention on "interested" legislators' behavior captures important information seemingly ignored by the market. A long-short portfolio based on these legislators' views earns abnormal returns of over 90 basis points per month following the passage of legislation. Further, the more complex the legislation, the more difficulty the market has in assessing the impact of these bills. Consistent with the legislator incentive mechanism, the more concentrated the legislator's interest in the industry, the more informative are her votes for future returns.

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Party and Constituency in the U.S. Senate, 1933–2004

Cited by 7 publications

References 17 publications

Friends in High Places

Friends in High Places

Censor Morum?The 17th Amendment, Religious Diversity, and Ideological Extremism in the Senate

Legislating stock prices

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